


Freed To Find Their Fates

by Fangirl_Goon_Squad



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Attempted Humor Here And There, F/M, Men Being Dense, Mild Smut, More Brainwashing Than Usual, No Really There Are Even Chickens, Occasional Punching, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Quiet Farm Life, Quite A Few Cusswords, Rare Pairings, The Winter Soldier - Freeform, These Jerks Are NOT Politically Correct, much angst, strong female lead, twist ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-08 20:06:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 21,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11653770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fangirl_Goon_Squad/pseuds/Fangirl_Goon_Squad
Summary: What if Steve wasn't the first one found?





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm blaming my current rare pair infatuation on over 40 years of nature documentaries instilling in my psyche an attraction to all things rare and unusual across the scope of my interests. Hope this one doesn't lose me any fans, but if you don't like it you're still welcome to comment.
> 
> I am having serious health challenges that I may not be able to get addressed in time due to bureaucratic delays and double-booked doctors. I have at least one more fic I hope to publish, but with no refuge available to me from a lethal allergen and all my allergy meds failing I can make no promises. That other piece...I'm not happy with the ending yet, so when I'm not freaking out about my potential lack of a future I'll try to whip it into shape. Oh, and I forgot a third that I might have time to get posted. I'm gonna try to do this one in one epic insomniac night of posting and editing. We shall see how far I get!
> 
> I'm also indulging in my penchant for the songs of my sordid youth either inspiring or dovetailing with my fic work. This time it's 80s pop.
> 
> Kyrie by Mr. Mister
> 
> Kyrie Eleison  
> Kyrie Eleison  
> Kyrie...
> 
> The wind blows hard against this mountainside  
> Across the sea into my soul  
> It reaches in to where I cannot hide  
> Setting my feet upon the road
> 
> My heart is old, it holds my memories  
> My body burns oxygen like flame  
> Somewhere between the soul and soft machine  
> Is where I find myself again
> 
> Kyrie Eleison down the road that I must travel  
> Kyrie Eleison through the darkness of the night  
> Kyrie Eleison where I'm going will you follow  
> Kyrie Eleison on a highway in the light
> 
> When I was young I thought of growing old  
> Of what my life would mean to me  
> Would I have followed down my chosen road  
> Or only wished what I could be
> 
> Kyrie Eleison down the road that I must travel  
> Kyrie Eleison through the darkness of the night  
> Kyrie Eleison where I'm going will you follow  
> Kyrie Eleison on a highway in the light
> 
> Chorus repeats x4

“You have _got_ to be joking,” Peggy told Phillips in a brusque tone.

“No, Agent Carter, they did not pull me off a hot op in a bad neighborhood to joke with you. You know I'm just not the kind to fraternize like that. Fraternizing is Howard's department.”

“But...Colonel...”

“That was a few pay grades ago,” Phillips growled at her, a hard gleam in his eyes.

“Whatever your current rank, sir, the problem is still that we have just discovered _we have Hydra's favorite toy!_ What do you think **they'll** do to get an asset like him back? How many bombs powered by that alien technology Red Skull was playing with do you think are in that damn arm?” She paused, rare tears slicking her cheeks. That alien tech of Red Skull's had cost them Steve Rogers and his shield, among other crucial resources, and it was a truly unusual thing for her to so clearly acknowledge her lingering grief even in privacy. And the worst part had been that when she'd walked in and been shown a photo of the captured assassin, she'd recognized his features despite his blank expression behind long-ish hair even for the current year, and had promptly thrown up in the first garbage can she could reach. Chester Phillips had been smart to have that freshly discovered detail withheld until she was on site, once he too took a closer look and recognized the face of the man who'd marched back into camp at Captain America's side after the theoretically impossible rescue at Azzano.

“Howard already took care of all that, at least all he could and you know that's a lot. We don't have much time, Carter. We think his enhancements are, aside from the arm, a lot like Steve's were but a little weaker. Make no mistake, he won't be out much longer and he's still in a class of dangerous all his own. We got him knocked out, but only some of the circuits in that arm could be shut down, so we don't know how much use he'll have of it when the drugs wear off. We only think we know the drugs won't last long. Be very sure to stay out of his reach, because if he wakes up in murder mode he won't hesitate to try any chance he gets.”

“And you want **me** to try to break through the Winter Soldier into a man you can only hope still exists, a man whose heart _you_ never had to watch break the way nobody seems to think mine did too. And then you want me to tell him his best guy is, as close as we can narrow it down, somewhere in an iceberg in the general vicinity of Greenland and lost to us forever?” Her phrasing at least appeared to slip right by him.

“If I had any confidence that there was anyone in the world more capable of surviving the attempt, I'd be talking to them if it took international kidnapping to arrange, Carter.”

“ _Kyrie eleison_ ,” she muttered darkly. When Phillips cocked an inquiring eyebrow, she translated. “I believe it's Latin for 'may God have mercy'. Tell me **one** more time how important he is to us now?”

“Without Captain Rogers, there is still enough of Hydra around the world to destroy _anything_ now that everyone's got nukes, and digging Sergeant Barnes out of his grave in the heart of the Winter Soldier is the only hope we have of stopping that by stopping them.” She listened with closed eyes, sighed deeply, then squared her shoulders.

“All right. Send me in.” A few buzzers and clanging barred doors later, she stepped into a surprisingly large room. Its walls were concrete, its narrow windows near the ceiling were heavily barred, and in one corner a drawn curtain suggested the place was under close surveillance because she knew there had to be a toilet behind it. Much of the room had been isolated with floor-to-ceiling metal bars, that corner included.

The focus of her attention, though, was the dark shape hunched sitting in a different corner. Gleaming and wary eyes followed her every motion from behind deep brown hair worn just long enough to hide his face if he tilted his head right. Although his mouth was tight, he hadn't actually bared his teeth at her yet, and from what she knew that was a shockingly good start. When he spoke at last, his voice sounded hoarse and strange from disuse, but with a nerve-prickling familiarity from both memory and recordings in her case. On her way to this crazy situation, she'd had time to watch and review a lot of the deeply classified material that Shield had collected on Hydra's half-mythical Winter Soldier. And to remember the valiant companion who had strolled into camp at Steve's side to prove her faith in Rogers even as Phillips had been dictating the KIA letter Sarah Rogers was to have received due to the assumption that the Azzano rescue was hopeless.

“So this time they send a beautiful woman to seduce my cooperation? Not clever, but not unwelcome. It's been a long time since I saw true beauty.”

“Sergeant Barnes, while I regard that as an extraordinary compliment from someone in your condition, I am not here to seduce you, and if you try to touch me against my will you may discover that even to someone enhanced like you I can be more dangerous than I look.”

_Now_ his teeth were bared.

“Sergeant Barnes, do you know who I am? Do you know what year it is?”

“You're one of the most treacherous bitches James Barnes ever met, Carter, and it's gotta be after November 1950 sometime.” Her blood ran cold; she'd never encountered hostility quite like his, quite so cuttingly personal and precisely cruel. Remembering that slow sidelong gaze she'd caught him giving Steve out the corner of her eye, she realized she'd never actually blamed him for his obvious distaste for her company because deep instinct had told her quietly what his reason was for that. And he'd pretty clearly just confessed to at least some involvement in the second attempted assassination of President Truman not so many years back, which alone could put him in front of a firing squad. She had more than enough years in to recognize that he expected lifetime solitary imprisonment to be his only survivable future. Briefly she hoped that certainty would cushion the shock when inevitably he would have to be told...

“So you _don't_ think you're James Barnes?”

“I'm wearing his face, living in his skin, but inside is what Hydra built out of him when I refused to let him die with dignity. Is that why Steve wasn't the one sent in?” Of course it had been memories of Rogers that had gotten through first. Maybe Phillips knew, but if he did he didn't care; maybe Howard Stark knew too but she knew him too well to think he'd spill or misuse that kind of information. But she'd known a long time now that her word could have had Steve and his best friend of a lifetime both discharged and probably still put Barnes at least in a stockade for life, the arm usually capable of tearing through concrete or sheet metal of course removed any way it could be should that ever be the case.

“No...it's not.”

“Just where is Steve, anyway?” He was starting to tense up at her slow hesitation, and it took a lot of effort for her to ignore that. It took even more for her to meet his eye while she told the highly abbreviated tale.

“Just a few days after you fell from the train, Red Skull tried to launch a huge flying fortress stealth bomber loaded with disintegrator warheads, bombs using that horrible blue whatever it is that his weapons all used. Every one had the name of a city on it, and they were big enough to level places like Chicago and Boston and New York. Steve got on board and somehow killed Red Skull, jettisoned the power source for the weapons into the North Atlantic somewhere but you know him, he was sure there was only one way to leave no doubt of safety for millions of Americans because the bombs couldn't be deactivated in time and the plane was on autopilot.”

“What did he do?” Barnes asked hoarsely.

“He...scuttled the plane. Somewhere near Greenland, we think.”

“But he's all right?”

“I'm so sorry, James, but we haven't found him. We don't even know if those bombs detonated. That is one of many things the organization that Howard Stark, Colonel Phillips, and I have founded, Shield, would like your help with, finding him, understanding the weaponry, anything you will do if asked. Unless you would rather be imprisoned, or executed cleanly, or taken back by Hydra because they do still exist—and they very much want to have you back.”

“They'll **take** me back any time they want. All they have to do is get an agent or even a half-decent recording close enough to me and they can program the manner of your doom with random words. There are code sequences in notebooks, always with a star on the cover, usually a black star on red. Whoever speaks the right words can pretty much do what they want with me.” Whatever stirred behind his now-dull eyes clearly warned there were things best not dredged back into the light, things that had been done that even he knew better than to set free of where he'd locked them.

“ _Do_ you want to go back, Barnes? That is a choice you are allowed to make, among others, although the down side of course would include the resumption of your status as 'shoot on sight, confirm actual death before reporting' in most countries. Most of those recommend an autopsy photo with vital organs removed as proof of death, for the record, because that would be very hard to stage believably. Would it suit you better to be Hydra's, to be a nameless weapon, to be without the torment of memory or conscience? To see those notebooks and be absolved of the blood shed by following orders until whatever mission is to be your last?”

“Not especially.” He spoke slowly, processing the lack of sarcasm in her questions and at last deciding to take a chance on her no matter how strange she made his head and his guts feel. “The down side to what I've become, being the most hunted, hated monster ever made from a soldier and a patriot, is a pretty serious mood-killer even when I'm too brainwashed to remember what moods are.”

“Do you know how many notebooks?”

He closed his eyes a moment. “The most I remember seeing in a single room is six. If he is still alive, Arnim Zola would be the man to... **ask**.” The last world was snarled with terrifying hostility. “And he might even know if there are any further traps in my arm, since I assume any found while it was disabled were removed. Obviously my memory's not the best, but I think he supervised the entirety of what Hydra did to me.” She nodded. “What more do I have to do to get a fucking _meal_ around here, how much more do I have to dig up? You're all so damn interested in what they did to me that you've never noticed what it did to my metabolism. Every mission I've run has had me on the verge of starvation, because Hydra apparently confused 'slightly hungry snipers are better shots' with 'we'll just put him on another IV diet until he starves to death on us'. I'll be a hell of a lot more cooperative and useful if you feed me before I start blacking out.” That was an impressive claim; for all his hostile attitude he was actually being spectacularly more cooperative than anyone had predicted...other than Howard, who won a lot of money from the few in the know once the results of this first interrogation attempt reached those cleared to read them. Stark was utterly devoted to his beautiful Maria, but that would never mean he wouldn't **always** bet on Peggy Carter to win out.

“I'll go find out. Thank you, Sergeant Barnes.”

He strongly doubted her casual promise...until a meal designed to be easy on his abused stomach but also delicious was delivered in portions even he could barely finish off. He might actually have made himself ill eating too fast, save for the partial disabling and resulting general uselessness of his robotic arm. At first sight, he'd been sure it was far too much, more food than he usually saw in two days, but an hour later only smears and crumbs remained, along with a small scrap of paper he'd found underneath the plate, the words _Again, thank you, Sgt._ , in lovely cursive handwriting. As he was shortly losing the battle with nodding off, it occurred to him to be grateful—a feeling he barely remembered—that Carter must have told them what the changes to his metabolism required as far as eating often and as much as he could hold at most opportunities. Despite that urge-turned-habit with the Winter Soldier, he was in fact clinically approaching dangerous malnutrition.


	2. 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I keep breaking the chapter counter, so I'll use an end note to designate when this is a completed work.

Ten days without human contact other than wordless grunts from the guards who brought him meals a lot more often since that first meeting passed, and then Carter was back. This time, she didn't stand as far from the bars as the room would allow, instead sitting just out of arm's reach on a wooden chair, legs crossed at the knee and a notebook open on her lap. She briefly took notes, which were about how different his color and posture were with some musculature rebuilding to support that arm and actual nutrition in his plentiful meals. The cameras and eyes assigned to keep watch over him had both shown him whiling away time with slow, careful exercises to rebuild his faded muscle tone. They'd only gotten one X-Ray of the prosthetic, and Howard was still working out what he could when it didn't make him feel ill just to look at the image. Evidently it was much more than an arm and shoulder joint with some clever plating, though Carter herself didn't understand half the techno-jargon he used when talking about what he'd managed to figure out. Wiring extended directly into Barnes's spinal cord from about the fifth cervical vertebra to nearly the first lumbar, plus there were supports made of some unidentified elemental metal inside his ribs that were permanently fused to his spine...using technology and materials even Stark was having trouble working his brain around.

“Oh, so it's questionnaire time, is it?”

“Yes. A little about tactical intel, quite a bit more about your life and your fate. If you care to answer. You won't be punished for refusal, not while we have you.” He gave her a long slow look before answering.

“My fate should be easy, Carter. I recommend beheading, if you can find anyone who still does that by guillotine, or firing squad if you can get experts who can decapitate me at short range. Not much else will do the job. Steve might've been able to break my neck for you, although I doubt he'd do it with anything but strong objections.”

“Not every single soul in the world sees you solely as the Winter Soldier, Barnes. That list starts with myself and the man you knew as Colonel Phillips, who has advanced in rank quite a bit by now and who is the backbone of Shield while I am its eyes and ears and Howard Stark its clever hands. Did it _never_ occur to you that there might be people out there who believe you're considered one of the longest-held and worst-tortured prisoners of war in human history?”

“I knew this fucking society was teetering on the precipice of the ridiculous the first time someone played me a new song by somebody callin' it rock-and-roll,” he snorted scornfully. “Buncha jangly little English fops, those kids. No offense to the like of you,” he added when a slow arch of an eyebrow reminded him where she'd gotten that lovely little accent of hers. “Hey, you responsible for the roughly tripling of my chow allotment?” She nodded. “Thanks. Not that your superiors give a damn, but I am feeling a little better.”

“My superiors care a great deal about your condition and your future, Sergeant Barnes, or you know full well you'd be dead by now. Yes, we _do_ want information about Hydra, anything you'll part with whether you're sure of its veracity or not, but we're **not** going to torture you to get it, any more than keeping you captive and that arm out of service if you consider those to be torture. My superiors agreed that actually feeding you and sending someone to speak with you rather than strapping you to a table to shout questions at you might work better than anything like the torture you've already endured for too long. We can do our own fact checking on anything you're willing to share with us.”

“And exactly why should I believe _you_?” After digging in her file a moment, she held up a photo that made him blanch and back away from the bars with wide eyes.

“There are, in total, seventeen notebooks concerned with the Winter Soldier experiments. We now have fourteen in Shield's possession. None were sent with me when I was told to ask you if you will talk to me about Hydra. I don't even know where they are, and only maybe a dozen other people in this country know they exist or how many there are. My clearance is good, but not that good.”

Afterward, having spilled a lot more intel than he thought he even knew, Barnes found himself feeling weirdly relieved, lightened inside somehow, in the wake of their conversation—not all of which had been the tactical questions and general nosiness he'd expected. It all seemed so strange still, this mellow confinement and the interrogation leavened with respect for his free will; while he was relieved somewhere hidden deep that it was starting to look like he might survive this capture, there were so many things he didn't know or remember. And a few extremely painful things he was grateful were not included in the questions he was, in fact, allowed to refuse to answer without perceptible consequences.


	3. 3

“The more we have these conversations, the easier it is for me to see why Steve loved you right to...the end.” It was spoken casually, but might have been the hardest sentence he'd ever forced out. _Of the line_ , he could not make himself finish, and Peggy knew exactly why.

“You're an idiot, Barnes.” She was as crisp and unflappable as ever. He snapped his head around to glare at her so fast he nearly smacked his cheekbone on one of the bars he was casually leaning against. Sometime in the last few days his prisoner scrubs had disappeared, replaced by pocketless tee shirts and hand-sewn soft pants, and the relaxation starting to seep into his body language proved the change was having the intended effect. Most of the fine motor function of his left arm had been restored, now that Stark had finally figured out a governor circuit to limit his access to its physical strength. He could steady a dinner plate just fine, but wasn't going to be ripping the bars out of the walls any time soon. He had, however, failed to have any kind of aggressive outburst at all, never testing his cage, never trying more than once apiece to engage the few people he saw other than this one stunning woman. And he didn't even seem to really resent the partly disabled arm all that much. All were to the ongoing surprise of those assigned to watch him, none of whom had expected that duty to be so boring.

“Why the fuck would you say that?” She just raised an eyebrow at him in that silent way she had, masking her sadness very well, keeping her grief buried far away from where it might leak into her voice.

“Do you **really** think he would have turned off the transponder on that plane before taking her down if loving _me_ had been enough to live for? Do you **honestly** think he would still be missing if he truly wanted to find me? We both know if _I_ was worth it to him he'd have clawed his way across any frozen sea to find help getting home. Just like he waded into Red Skull's literal nightmare factory at Azzano alone over a gut feeling that your KIA letter was premature.” That made his whole body clench like he'd been kicked in the navel, and though she clearly saw that she did not react further.

“No. You're wrong. You **have** to be wrong. He wasn't like that.”

“James...we made a date, he and I, during our last conversation, just before he put the plane in the water. He only thought it was with me. He was expecting to be back with _you_ , because it was years after we lost him before you surfaced for the first time. He went to his death expecting you'd gone to yours in that ravine, like we all thought until the Winter Soldier was finally identified. He made it _less than a week_ thinking you dead and knowing I would wait as long as it took him to be able to try sharing a life, wanting a life, wanting a partner after the war, even one he had to keep so much from in his heart. I'm **not** the one he loved truly and deep where it's real, James, or he would have let me save him from himself when I came as close to begging as I know how, would have let me try to save him from the memory of losing you.”

“You really are one hell of a dame,” Barnes sighed quietly, forehead leaned with unexpected melancholy on one of the bars, his own long-hidden sadness finally leaking into his expression. He'd been having nightmares ever since his capture, and now the horror-stricken face and reaching hand receding in the distance as he fell free through cold and terror and blowing snow made so much more sense. “Sorry to call you treacherous...I didn't understand...a lot, that first day. If I ever thought I'd be a free man again I'd ask you out dancin' in no time flat, I really would.”

“Anything new surface for you since my last visit?”

“Yeah, matter of fact.” And just like that it was back to the way it usually went, Peggy sitting with those stunning legs crossed, jotting swift notes as he swam through murky recall. Lately, he spent more of their conversational time sitting on the bed than pacing his tiny domain, an improvement in attitude that hadn't gone unnoticed. Just unremarked, so far at least.

And once again that night it was Barnes taking a risk, alone but still ashamed, teeth clamped in his linens to keep quiet rather than scream her name when only his imagination, his memory of those legs, and about five fast strokes through a loose fist were enough.


	4. 4

Several of her casual visits later, **everything** changed. After he'd decided for once to _start_ their visit off by discussing several things that had surfaced, once the notepad was put away, she paused to just smile at him a long moment. “I have news, James.”

“About what?”

“The notebooks.” As always, he got a little ashen at any mention of those books.

Before he could speak, she was saying something he didn't recognize and suddenly the inside of his head was awash in fireworks and dizzying riptides, his body refusing to respond no matter what he wanted. When she was done, he was huddled snarling silently on the floor, panting and sweaty...until she said just one more word.

“ _Soldat_?” His head snapped up—but she'd seen the tapes. His eyes weren't blank they way that word had always made them in every image known of the 'reset procedure'. She smiled broadly despite how obviously pissed he was, and she was a little surprised to note that her honest expression actually calmed him some. “That was the one they hid the deepest, in the notebook it took us the longest to find and decode. The one they'd only have used if you'd ended up in the Hague, the last way they had to save themselves in the event of your capture while they survived but couldn't just kill you. You're **free** , James. I just permanently deactivated the Winter Soldier and removed all knowledge you had of that program, leaving only the useful skills they trained in. And all the notebooks have been incinerated so the atrocities perpetrated on you cannot happen by Zola's means again. I was allowed to witness the incineration in your place, and I'm working on getting you cleared to view the footage for yourself. Howard will be here tomorrow to remove the governors and finish repairing what he can in your arm.” Without waiting for his stunned expression to change, she rooted through her bag, larger than usual, finally dredging out a portable cassette player, one of the first of a new generation of small electronics for military use. Setting it to play, she looked at someone he couldn't see and nodded firmly.

His cell door was open just long enough for her to get through.

“What the _hell_?” he muttered in wonderment and lingering paranoid tension, backing into the bars as far from the door as he could. Then the music started, the kind of soft swing he'd spent so many nights dancing to with sweet pre-war ladies, and Carter held out a hand in the kind of invitation he could never have forgotten. The music sounded tinny and strangely distant, but that turned out not to matter.

“Care to dance, Sergeant?”

To be honest, he'd missed dancing so much solely on its own merits that he'd probably have taken up the offer from Colonel Phillips, who was actually Lieutenant General Phillips these days. While he kept his mouth deliberately shut when he'd always been a talker on the dance floor as a younger man, the rest of him remembered everything he needed to know to fall right into a kind of soft heaven he'd never dreamed of finding again. The music was gentle, the way his troubles drifted away from his heart so very relaxing, the way an experienced dancer like Peggy reminded him effortlessly how to lead so reassuring, her calm and smile unruffled by holding the prosthetic hand...

“You must've caught someone really important to celebrate like this,” he tried to joke, his voice paler and rougher than he'd hoped after all their time talking had finally smoothed it back into its natural tones. But neither his feet nor hers faltered. “Unless of course this is what I get for being honest about the notebooks.”

“Oh, we've actually caught dozens of extremely horrible people based on what you gave us. Quite a few are either imprisoned or executed by now. Zola was one of the first, by the way; we weren't aware of his Hydra work or we'd never have recruited him. At least he was easy to find. He's been dead a while now, one of the few deaths I've ever been so grateful to watch. We never gave you a calendar because it was feared it might make the passing of time too incremented for you to stay even relatively comfortable, although your indoor lighting has been arranged to mimic seasonal sunlight.”

“I thought the days were getting longer again. So it really is spring?” He paid attention to the hours of daylight he could track through those narrow windows, just like he paid attention to every single variable detail in his environment. Always a sniper at his core he was these days, alert to so much detail around him as ever whether it was tactical or not. Now his attention caught on her small, conspiratorial grin.

“Yes, it's spring. March 10th, to be precise.” She felt it sink in and settled to a stop in perfect time with him. “Happy birthday, Sergeant Barnes.”

And that was the first moment stained for him by guilty relief that with Steve gone, he was clear to try making a terrifying mistake all on his own: she'd never said anything about a boyfriend or any other beloved besides Rogers, and didn't wear any rings at all. He was a patient man if nothing else by now, and so did not act on his epiphany while they danced away both sides of the tape before she had to go. She strode away from a man feeling closer to being himself than he had since shipping out after boot, a man slowly trying to work out a way to do the impossible in his own days, short as he believed the countdown to his execution to be getting.

He'd have sworn in a court of law that the smell of her shampoo lingered on his shirt for _days_.


	5. 5

“...Did you just say _released_?”

“Yes, between entirely voluntary missions, into protective and legally responsible custody unless you misbehave on us and have to be confined again. Obviously, your continued failure to act up has finally been noticed by pretty much everyone who isn't Hydra but knows you're still alive.” As usual now when he was caught off guard, he'd backed himself into the corner she'd first seen him in. He didn't bare his teeth this time, instead looking like he desperately wanted a bolt-hole in a room that left him nowhere to go. Having solid walls and metal bars to brace against seemed to help, so she made no effort to coax him back closer to where she sat in her usual chair, legs crossed, notebook at the ready. Although he'd made no attempt to touch her since the birthday dance, the chair was quite a bit closer to the bars than it had started out.

“Whose custody?”

“Well, they'd like to try trusting you to stay with me, a decision I support. It seems I am the only agent in the country who has encountered you, has survived, and doesn't even have battle scars to show for it. They've set up a lovely little place way out in the country, and I have a lot of vacation time coming. At the very least you'll be on pretty strict probation for starters, but you won't have to wake up to bars in the windows either.”

“Were you chosen?” The slight narrowing of his eyes was important, she knew. He was still and always a man highly alert to even minor information, a man to whom details mattered greatly. Having read his military records, she had expected nothing else from a soldier so naturally gifted as a sniper. She'd seen him prove that attention to detail some way in every single one of their conversations thus far.

“I volunteered, James. They set up a wonderful situation, a little New England hobby farm, but no one expects you to want to be alone so far from help with someone you don't even know. I'm as close to a friend as we're sure you have, and I believe in the man behind the Hydra training. I believe that strongly in the James Barnes I met during the war, the one whose best friend could never find a way to say the words that could've put you both in a stockade for life. I believe with all my heart that the deactivation sequence worked. I'm also very good with weapons, fists included, and stand a slightly better than average chance if you freak out, at least long enough to call you the right assistance.”

“If you're on the level, just do me one favor?”

“How can I help, James?”

“Whatever the fuck _elephant_ tranquilizers were used to get me here would make me a much more docile and safe passenger on the way to wherever isn't here. I don't always travel well awake in non-military situations. Military I just used my training to ignore, but I have more practice being the Winter Soldier than I do being a grown man. The Soldier's not someone you take on a road trip even with the actual programming gone.”

She saw to it that he remembered virtually nothing of alternating being either passed out or trying to be funny while moving and speaking in slow motion the entire trip. She even took care of bribing their guards to keep the hilarity a secret, lest they spoil the 'international man of murder' image for Barnes. She had to cough up extra when he decided to try to imitate one of the trained seals he'd seen in a circus act as a child before nodding off again still giggling. They rolled in late, and he barely had time to grab a shower before stumbling to what proved to be a guest-room bed to sleep away the next fourteen hours.

He woke to the glory of early afternoon, complete with the availability of a shower, toiletries, and a closet full of clothes they must have measured him for fitting while he was unconscious at some point. Still reeling at the difference to his entire world in less than 48 hours, he followed an intensely attractive smell to the kitchen after showering and dressing.

“After all my years hanging around with you ghastly Americans and your peculiar food,” she grinned from her post by the stove, “grilled cheese sandwiches have become a guilty pleasure of mine. Would you like one?”

“Very much. This is all...so strange, Agent Carter.”

“You're a free man now within the limits you've been caught up on, James, with no rank on either of us unless we end up on a mission together. Call me Peggy.” Her eyebrows knotted when he winced.

“How about...just Peg? Could that be okay?” The pain shattering through his expression and body language alike explained his misgivings. Peggy had been part of Steve's life, and Steve wasn't going to be part of his again. Only Howard was even still looking for Rogers, and he had to confine that hobby to his scarcer and scarcer free time. Maybe someday Barnes would welcome reminders, but things must be taken slowly, she knew full well. This was certainly not the time or place to press him.

“Of course. Is James all right? I'm sure now that you understand why I never call you Bucky.”

“James is good. I...I think the Winter Soldier murdered Bucky, really, that he had to as some kind of test of loyalty. Ability to follow orders without ethical issues, that kind of thing.”

“You were **tortured** , taken apart without your consent! Built into something you _loathed_ every second of being whether you were allowed to feel it or not! Do **not** disparage your suffering in front of me, James. I know better and you should too.”

“Easy, there. Didn't mean to hit a nerve,” he apologized softly. Brave, this one, and surprising too, to snap so sharply at him under any circumstances.

She didn't answer while finishing the first sandwich, dropping it on his plate, cooking herself one, and then repeating the whole process because both of them were actually pretty hungry. After lunch, though, she made herself scarce by surveying the further corners of the property to find good locations for garden spots and poultry coops. She also wanted privacy to reflect on things, like the startling knee-jerk power of her response and the gentle kindness of his. If she was going to have to live with that maddeningly handsome, frustratingly naïve, fascinatingly intelligent distraction that answered to James, she'd have to get a hell of a lot better at keeping her cool in conversation.

Trusting him could come later, if at all.


	6. 6

Nearly a year had passed on their little farm, with the two convincingly playing “slightly contentious but disgustingly cute lovebirds” on the rare occasions their scarce neighbors dropped by to check out the new kids in the little farmhouse that had a long local history. Such guests always left with fresh herbs, the day's eggs, or some other such farm-life treat, carrying tales that the new kids were doing the place justice, cleaning up what was there instead of tearing it down and rebuilding to more modern standards. The earliest spring sprouts were coming up in the greenhouse, the fishing hole was thawed early for once according to the grumbling of the old men down at the general store, and the hens were laying more often again. They'd gone through two small flocks before it had been James who'd solved their small-predator problem—the skunks, foxes, weasels, cats, dogs, and every other mammalian carnivore or opportunist in the area had taken to treating their coop like a snack vending machine in the earliest days no matter how they tried to fence and protect the area. It took Peggy a month without losing a single bird to pry loose his secret: wild animals, house cats, and the majority of dogs could not abide the smell of him after his augmentation, so he'd urinated, bit by bit, a complete invisible fence around their livestock housing. He was keeping it up, considering it just another farm chore no matter how giggly his beautiful housemate got at any mention of marking boundaries.

They were still sleeping in separate rooms, though, and would touch only in casually, friendly fashion. Barnes had hoped his initial crush on her had been all about that first dance since the war for him, but it was way past time for that to have faded...and it hadn't. Not across the course of several dangerous but brief missions, and certainly not in the easy peace of their country life. Eventually he had to admit it to himself: he'd managed to complicate his already expert-level challenging life impressively by letting himself fall completely in love with Peg. Agent Carter. His handler, even though she never used that word. The woman the whole world had known that Captain America had loved, who had loved Rogers back enough to keep her mouth shut about the way Steve had looked at his best friend when he thought no one else could see.

That was why, one morning, she went looking because James hadn't come back in from his morning chores; living in peace had uncovered an enjoyment of routine in him that she thought might date back to boot camp. She found him sitting cross-legged in the chicken yard, hand-feeding his favorite hens vegetable scraps from the table and fresh-pulled weeds. The birds occasionally cocked their heads at him, but the silent tears that ran free down his face didn't come close to changing their focus on food. She'd been surprised initially at how well the flock had taken to him when so many other animals didn't, until she realized sitting with them totally changed his body language. Chickens would never ask nosy questions, would never judge his past, and had apparently learned he could be trusted. Peggy managed to sneak out of sight before he could catch her, only to walk boldly up and let herself in a few minutes later. Bunches of greens, mostly weeds the flock found irresistible, flapped enough in her hands to start interesting some of the birds, who shortly were climbing all over both brunettes when James just slumped sideways to continue his crying into her shoulder.

“Anything I can help with, James?” she asked him softly.

“You're the last person who could help. I shouldn't even let you near me.” He reared away, tears still rolling down his cheeks but more slowly now, when she gently stroked his jawline, not minding that he hadn't shaved in a few days. Scruffy or sleek, it didn't matter, not to her. Despite all the hurt she'd taken, she still believed in good people and insisted the man she lived with belonged on that short list.

“Do you really still think you'll hurt me?”

“Not the way you think I will,” he managed. “But yes, I think so.”

“If you do think you're going to hurt me, your best defense is to tell me how, Barnes.”

“I'm not ready for that.” She made to touch him again, and this time he dodged sharply enough to get scolded by several hens and bitten on the ear by the banty scrambling for balance on his metal shoulder, mostly bare because he had immense tolerance for cold; he could hang around in a tee shirt when it was barely above freezing and feel no discomfort. Taking the hint, Carter handed off the treats and went back to the house to work on a surprise cooking project. Her calm, uncomplicated departure threw his internal spin even further off center.

When he finally staggered back to the house after doing every single farm chore he could even think of, up to and including building several small multi-bay compost stations around fruit trees, he looked like a train wreck but had gotten a week's work done. All the fences were checked, tightened or repaired as needed, outbuildings checked for small repair needs that were then dealt with, and he'd hit the well pump enough times to refresh all his scent marks around the boundaries he patrolled. Without a word to Peggy, he headed for a very long shower.

When he walked into the kitchen, though, it was unoccupied other than a mad scramble of several kinds of recently used cookware. Dinner was already on the dining table, and it was unusually lavish within the means they lived on these days. Now his slow, suspicious look was altogether different from how she remembered him incarcerated or during his first days on the farm.

After they ate, everything changed.

Only when she brought a small chocolate-frosted cake in from the kitchen, his initials rendered in tiny candles on its top, did he remember.

“Jesus, is it really my birthday?”

“Yes. March 10th. I know you're not into the big fanfare, so I thought perhaps a large dinner, a small cake, and a short dance would be a most appropriate celebration.”

“Even if I have no idea how old I am. Does my birthday actually still count since I spent so many of them in cryo?”

“I didn't bake because I had existential questions about quantifying calendar years versus lived years. I stuck with the calendar because you have more than twenty years of celebrating on March 10th under your belt before you even went to war. Seems it'd be easiest to stay with what you got used to.” The cake lasted seven entire minutes between the two of them. She dropped a swing-jazz greats collection onto the phonograph and just waited until Barnes could resist the rhythms no more. In her usual exceedingly professional fashion, even in a moment like this, she refrained from commenting on the fact that—just like their first dance a year gone past—the poor bastard was hard as a rock against her hip and clearly praying she either didn't notice or didn't say anything.

Because he truly did love to dance, it took a whole twenty minutes for him to slip up, to let himself try the one sin-soaked luxury he was sure would put him back in a cage, the one he might never have grieved enough for Steve to forgive himself over. He was great at all the fancy moves, the alternative steps and the swings and the dips...and after one dip he just let his own momentum bring them into position before kissing her slow and gentle. Peggy hadn't been touched by anyone but hostiles or medical personnel in a very long time, but in that surreal moment she could feel only the places they were in contact, from his talented mouth down to around about one kneecap. And he was a very talented kisser, always had been even before the practice he'd gotten as a teen, had been right from his first try so long ago with a girl whose name he'd forgotten long before enlisting. Carter wanted nothing more in that moment than to let the whole world melt away and forget them, leave them to this soft glory.

Only a moment of bliss was all he could let himself have, though, and then he reared away, turned loose of her with sadness glassy in his eyes, shook his head 'no' before retreating to the guest room he'd claimed as his own. She let him go, left him alone other than once in the wee hours when she could not fall back asleep after a particularly...enthused and vigorous...dream about him and cracked the door to his preferred room open just far enough to watch his ribs rise and fall a few times to reassure her he was all right. All the will she could bring to bear was what it took to keep her from slipping into the room to see if he'd let her survive trying to sneak into the bedcovers with him, regardless of any wanton intentions. She had known from their first dance how warm he ran, and this wasn't the first night her own bed down the hall seemed far too empty and cold with only her in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ugh...not gonna make the finish line. It's a quarter to three in the morning where I am, and even if I can't sleep I must give my fairly shredded spine a break since I can't take painkillers any more until we get this allergy mess sorted out.


	7. 7

It turned out sleeping peacefully didn't mean he was all right. Both were early risers, though Peggy tended to be the one up early enough to start their coffee. Making coffee and starting breakfast without him were part of her daily routine, and starting breakfast always included hollering down the hall at Barnes to request his preference for the day. When two tries got no answer, she went to see if he was just sleeping in more heavily than usual.

The room was immaculately empty of any sign of him other than used linens packed into his hamper; the bed had been changed and made with military precision. Not much was missing, but enough to tell the tale—the few things he'd brought with him, a few sets of clothes, just enough for a man who wasn't sure he wanted to survive had been taken. She knew as clearly as if he'd written it on the walls before leaving, that emotion was getting the better of him and he believed that to be how she'd get hurt some way or another that she would not have expected...at least not before that dance. Stuffing back her personal response as hard as she could, she went to the phone to call Phillips and Howard Stark. She was grateful once again that the two men worked so often in close proximity, which meant only one unpleasant phone call. It was, in fact, Howard who picked up when the Shield main office phone rang.

“Peggy, it's been far too long. Do you know no one in this Godforsaken desert has figured out 'fondue' _isn't_ a dirty word yet? Care to join me for dinner one of these nights and get them steered right?”

“Maybe...but first I have some bad news, Mr. Stark.”

“I keep telling you to call me Howard. I know perfectly well what your first name is and if you don't start using mine, I'm gonna teach my first kid to call you Auntie Em when they're old enough to talk.”

“In times of bad news, I revert to professionalism. You know that.”

“So...if it's bad news and you haven't asked me to pass you over to Phillips, my guess is you'd like a little practice saying whatever it is out loud. You know me; I'm game, no matter how bad it is.”

“Barnes has disappeared. Within the last couple of hours, I'm sure. We...had a bit of a...weird night last night, and when I checked on him at oh-dark-thirty he was sleeping sound, but when I called him to breakfast he's gone with clothing and kit.”

“ _Shit_. You maybe should let me tell Phillips, but you should also be getting your gorgeous ass over here as fast as we can arrange. Remind me where your nearest airstrip is?” She did, and by the time she could pack the uniform she expected to be stripped of alongside a couple of days' worth of civilian clothing, the arrangements had all been made. By the time she got to the airstrip, the plane was waiting, sleek and pretty like so many of Stark's recent designs. Also waiting were a pair of sleek young men, one of whom asked for her car keys. He took her car, his partner following, back to the farm while Carter boarded the jet with heavier and heavier steps until she feared the gravitational mass of her guilt might push her straight through the plane's floor or just hold it fast to the ground.

She was in no way surprised that it was Phillips who met her at the hangar the moment she stepped off the plane.

“You never gave us reason to think anything had gone wrong,” her superior mused unhappily as they headed for the meeting rooms at Howard's latest favorite Shield compound.

“Because he never gave _me_ reason!” she protested, frustrated by trying to figure out where she'd gone wrong with Barnes. “I'll walk you through last night before you have to start asking embarrassing questions. The first time I spoke to him yesterday morning after breakfast, he expressed fear that he was going to hurt me, but didn't specify how that might happen even when I reminded him that knowledge is our best defense now. He worked outside all day. After dinner I brought out a birthday cake, and since he still doesn't pay attention to calendars he had managed to forget. After we ate it, we danced. He kissed me...” and eyebrows went up all around the room, “but then he backed off, shook his head 'no', and went straight to bed. When I checked on him in the middle of the night, he was sleeping soundly or faking it well—I watched to be sure he was breathing. And then when I called him to come to breakfast this morning, no more than six hours later, everything he regarded as just his own was gone, the whole room cleaned and left ready like a hotel.”

At her own insistence, she was sent back to the farm. “I've seen enough pointless slaughter on battlefields,” she'd snarled to win her way, “and I have no intention of subjecting the chickens we loved enough to name and hand-feed to **that** fate. Call it a vacation, call it a sabbatical, or fire me, but I'm _**going** _ back to that farm.”


	8. 8

Four days later, she was sitting in the chicken yard, silently shaking and weeping as the trusting birds ate not only out of her hands but cleaned the mess they made with dropped food off her lap. And then abruptly they vanished, a thing they rarely did _en masse_. Wiping her eyes clear on a sleeve, she looked to the partly cloudy sky, sure a predator must have frightened them back into their coop. It was just about time to get the anti-raptor netting set up, so it was the sky she checked first because only aerial predators were still a problem.

But no, the whole lot of them were crammed into one corner of the fence, noisily demanding more treats, some even hop-flapping ridiculously into the air in an unpracticed parody of flight. One of Barnes's favorites, a large silver-laced Wyandotte hen, kept trying especially vigorously.

“Jemima, you're gonna hurt yourself, you idiot biddy. I swear, I never thought I'd see something less aerodynamic off the ground once they finally got the C-130's in the air.” The next time the black-and-white hen leaped, she didn't land on the ground. After a moment of astonishment, she surveyed her world from the regal perch made with a wide-spread metal hand. Bucky gently lowered her back to the ground, straightening up just in time to catch a real haymaker from Peggy with his left cheek, snapping his head to one side and slightly shifting his usually rock-solid balance. Although no hint of his opinion leaked into his voice, he was impressed. That had actually _hurt_.

“Yeah, I thought it was time to say goodbye properly.”

“ **Why** , James? Why do you think you have to leave?”

“That should be...obvious enough, easy for a smart dame like you to figure out.” She swept an arm around his neck, pulling him into the sturdy hen-fence to make him stumble off balance completely, and the moment he'd turned his head far enough she was the one kissing him. With a familiar kind of enthusiasm he hadn't felt since before boot camp, one remembered from any of the girls who'd known so many lovely ways to thank him for a night's dancing and romance. He jerked away once, terrified and trying to make a break for it, but Carter had a very nice workout room set up in the basement and had been burning off a lot of frustration in that room. She deliberately over-corrected hard enough to flip him over the short part of the chicken-yard fence, grinning with a wicked sparkle in her eyes when he landed with his ass in a puddle.

“The obvious answer isn't always the only one, you masochistic jackass,” she told him pointedly as the chickens were already climbing all over him, hunting in case he was hiding treats. The way he just automatically started scratching under itchy molting hackle feathers and petting sleek saddles, gently murmuring to the birds, undid some of her frustration but knotted a few other parts up in new, challenging configurations. “ _You_ need a shower and several good meals, and after having to explain my bullshit to Lieutenant General Phillips in person, I want a damn **explanation** while I feed you.” He winced at the mental picture of how that conversation must have gone—very few people enjoyed talking to Phillips when he wasn't happy with a situation, and for assorted very good reasons.

“You can have the explanation now—you've more than earned it. You never once treated me like The Asset expected, like I was anything other than James Barnes **ever** in my life and never mind the monster answering to _Soldat_. You never punished me for the awful things I said, for the things I called you, while I was in that cage. You make me think and feel things I don't understand. Want things I haven't remembered the words for yet. Things that feel like betraying the memory of my best friend no matter how little I understand. It's fucking terrifying in my head right now, but I came back hoping I could say farewell once I was sure I wouldn't black out and kill you. I spooked, and I ran, because that's what I've been trained to do when I'm spooked, go to ground and get it sorted out.” Muddy water ran down the backs of his legs when he stood, but he ignored the chill tickle with his usual stoicism. “All the time I've spent mulling through everything while I was gone, and it all comes down to me thinking that after all I've been through, I'm not the kind of man any more who can love you right, like you deserve, like Steve would have tried if you'd ever found him.”

Entirely heedless of the feathers, mud, straw, and miscellaneous litter stuck to him, Carter stepped close enough to feel him breathing...close enough to feel him stop after a tiny shadow of a whimper when she kissed him again. This time, there was no frivolity.

“Before you say it,” she growled upon stepping back to head them for the house, “you are nobody's stunt man here. I think one of the things Steve truly admired in both of us, worked to learn from both of us, is our ability to commit entirely to anything once we're convinced. I'm convinced the feelings I have about you are _all about you_ , James. You're not a stand-in, a replacement, a Plan B option. I've put a lot of the last couple of days into thinking it over, and I'm definitely convinced.”

“So...you're saying, maybe if leaving here wasn't what I wanted but what I thought I had to do for us both to stay safe...” She tilted a half-grin at the tentative hope dawning in his expression.

“Leaving here would make you something of an **idiot** , Barnes, and I am not widely regarded as a stupid woman. Or one particularly tolerant of idiots, even when the bars between us last time I called you that are gone now and you're still plenty dangerous as men go. I'm saying one glitch, however bad, isn't the end of your welcome in this life. I'm saying I _could_ have had all the birds slaughtered, the farm sold, and gone back to my old job with just one request, which is entirely the opposite of what I did request. Firmly, and Lieutenant General Phillips is no easier to be firm with than you might think. I'm saying you are a surprisingly easy man to enjoy being around now that you are James Barnes, civilian, veteran, and getting in practice at the grown man part. I'm saying I wish you'd stay here whether you want to get emotionally involved or not. And staying emotionally uninvolved, by the way, doesn't ruin your chances if you're interested in being physically involved.” He startled visibly. That sniper's caution and attention to detail had never slacked whether on a mission or the farm, and neither had his mistrust of unfamiliar situations. “I'm a very bold and forward woman, always have been and grateful it's slowly becoming more widely accepted for women to be bold and forward now without being insulted in public for it if they're careful enough. In case it's been far too long since anyone complimented you, you do happen to be a very attractive fellow. You're a lot of things as a man that the world's never gotten to see yet but that you've shown me. I can think of several things I feel confident I'd enjoy being shown that I haven't seen yet.”

He spent a long few minutes alone with massive revelations and the whole peeping, squabbling flock scrambling and surging around his feet. Most of the banties tried to climb his legs until he finally sat down, feeling like he needed some time to contemplate the long-absent possibilities a willing woman could bring back to his radically changed, still unnerving semi-civilian life.

Peggy had gone to get some of the chickens' favorite treats for him to distribute, but ended up giggling herself into tears after tossing the snacks all over him where he'd decided to sit cross-legged in a corner, his back braced on the coop wall and a fence panel. Neither the impact of the food nor the subsequent oddly gentle feeding frenzy that followed were enough to wake him. By the time Carter remembered where the Polaroid was and retrieved it, James was still sleeping soundly. So were most of the nearly a dozen chickens perched on or cuddled in around him where he sat.

She took two photos, one of which she would keep for herself. The other she immediately had hand-couriered to Phillips with a note on the back explaining that he'd returned of his own will and she'd have a much more complete report as soon as she could. She did not mention that Jemima, always one of his very favorites among the flock, was the one blobbed into a mass of feathery contentment on top of his head as Barnes dozed with one of her legs hanging in front of his face.


	9. 9

Dinner and a shower had both been deemed mandatory, and mealtime was peppered with quick inquiries that helped them figure out when and where his head was at. He was still so paranoid and shaken by their earlier conversation that she had to literally lead him by the hand to get him further down the hall than the room he normally slept in. The house actually had five full bedrooms, and it wasn't her own private space she led him into—she was smart, and correct to think that shared space would feel more comfortably neutral for him. Then she broke out every trick in her extensive personal book to get his guard down and his dick up; she was not surprised when the former proved the more difficult by a wide margin. No matter how long she was off duty, however, her relevant skill sets stayed sharp.

She knew she had him at last by the sound he tried not to make when her deft hands got his shirt unbuttoned and his pants undone while he was distracted by her mouth. He did try, once, to flinch away when her roving touches skimmed too close to the disaster of scar tissue on his left side. She apologized by sliding both hands into his boxers...an awful lot, he thought, like a dame who knew what to expect. Most of the ones he remembered touching him like this had been caught entirely off guard if allowed to discover that he was surprisingly good at hiding the fact that he was hung big enough to scare off many a fine-framed feminine temptation in his youth. Her hands, though, were as confident as they were gentle while she slowly started teasing until his physical response began working on his emotional and mental resistance.

“You seem surprised, James,” she chuckled softly in one of his ears. “Surely you didn't think I cut myself off from _all_ pleasures and comforts. Not during or after the war, during especially, when joy and hope were at their scarcest.” Her hands stopped moving, a deliberate attempt to provoke a response she could read. The grip his upper teeth had on his lower lip was as obvious, as legible in body language, as the sounds she recognized as his left hand being locked immobile—a safety feature he'd been grateful to allow Howard to install once Stark had managed to invent the tiniest known such switch to allow Barnes that control. Her sweet smile all real, she moved to sit astride his lap so that the cautious first touches he warily indulged himself with hands or lips had much better access to sensitive spots. Suspecting shell-shock was the least of his hidden troubles, she moved slowly, kissing him again and pulling him deeply into that moment while she managed to shimmy out of most of what she wore above the waist.

At least one shred of James Barnes had survived and showed itself in that moment when he finally let his eyes open when she turned loose of his mouth. It wasn't in his awestruck expression, or the fact that he could not speak in that moment, or the light touch of his right hand on her nearly-bare back. It showed itself to be an old-fashioned sensibility...the way he flushed slightly but all the way to his nipples at the sight and smell and feel of so much bare skin that wasn't his own. And then he got a shade or two redder, the result of her ticklish giggle when a twitch from the sizable dick few people had ever guessed he was packing brushed up against the back of Carter's thigh through their clothes.

“And besides, **you** were out on perimeter the night I got the rest of the Howlies drunk enough to cough it up. Steve wasn't there, had KP that night I think, but the rest were. I recall it was Morita who cracked first. They were very clear that you'd been unanimously declared the man to avoid a dick-measuring contest with, drunk or sober, hard or soft. The only really new trick here is going to be you remembering that I'm in good physical shape, but I'm **not** enhanced. I know you locked your hand. I'll try to be all the other kinds of careful we need.”

“Do you...can you...is trusting me this far really the best idea?”

“Of _course_ not,” she chuckled against his neck, grinning at the noise he made over the feel of her breath, the brush of her lips on sensitive skin, the sweet acceptance settling in his expression that she might never forget he could be dangerous as the fury of Hell, even to her, but remained courageous enough to still push a boundary from time to time. “The really fun ones never are, you know. But in all the time we've spent together, attempted flight's the **worst** you've come up with as far as hurting me in any way, so we must be doing something right. Did you forget to notice you never even _tried_ to hit me back out there? I can recall at least three openings I left you that were big enough for a delivery truck...sideways.” She kissed him again, searching and mellow, suddenly sure that the specific way he held her close and let tiny whimpering chuffs play against her skin while they were necking were her own sort of victory bell.

“I don't...there aren't...um, I've never had a reason to keep condoms around after...the train, you know.” Some of the few memories he remained reluctant to discuss with her involved Hydra attempting to stud him out to mostly military women. Many had even survived long enough to catch pregnant before something in one of his cryo-storage adaptation treatments had gone awry, but none of the very few babies had carried the enhancements. And he knew damn well Carter had noticed that he never took time to chase tail—or accept offers—while on a mission. It made sense, despite his pre-war playboy reputation; the Winter Soldier hadn't been the kind of asset deployed for anything but clinically dispassionate murder at long or short range. And Hydra's thorough infiltration of his entire personality to render him more controllable when deployed had left deep scars to outlast their now-destroyed programming.

“We don't need them. I was surgically sterilized years ago, and your medical workups show that the changes made to your DNA by all you've been through now include sterility without the usual hormone production failure that goes with it. We already knew you're immune to everything, and I personally doubt you've given anyone else actual permission touch your bare skin since the war.” She saw the obvious answer in his eyes, felt it in his skin under her hands, and treated it with delicacy and great respect. “We can just be lovers, James, whether it's only this once that I think maybe we both need or a lifetime hobby. There is no chance of us inflicting our kind of lives on a child. You _can't_ get sick, and I just had my regulation testing battery come up as clean as ever.” This time, that unflappable little grin of hers, so calm in the face of what would once have been considered too dangerous for anyone to try, was what cleanly undid his intent to protest again.

“Please...oh merciful God you feel so good...please go easy? Take it slow? It's...it's just...it's been so damn long... Tell me what a few of your favorite things are?” He shivered with the effort it took to speak any of those questions at all, never mind quietly and mellow.

“Of course,” she grinned. “How on earth could we expect you to try to become practiced at being a grown man if you don't get any _chances_ to practice?” And, with her history of fearlessly unorthodox thinking, she usually made a very good instructor indeed.

Although she was surprised, a little, that she ended up having to be the one to teach him something she was sure he'd already know: it didn't **matter** what caliber he was packing. He was used to taking extra time to get women worked up to handle the size of his dick, but also used to them yelping pain regardless whenever they did let him mount up. Peg, with her much more worldly experience and open mind, responded so well to his tricksome and talented mouth that finally taking her was a matter of one slow surge being all he needed to slide him all the way in, and the sound that slipped from her throat had no pain in it. For a couple of the longest heartbeats of his civilian life he couldn't even breathe.

“Most women just need to learn how to relax right, and most men would do well to learn half the tricks you can do with your tongue,” she reassured him even as she essayed a small hip roll just to see his reaction. Barnes grinned wickedly at last despite his lingering worries, finally letting himself be immersed in a pleasure he'd forgotten how to miss.

“Hate to bust the romance for you, Peg, but all I did was a little trick one of the Howlies claimed he'd invented. He called it licking the alphabet.” He paused to regroup...God, she felt good, as good as she tasted and sounded and smelled...and the moment she saw worry about his chances of accidentally hurting her start to clear the raw lust from his eyes, she bit him to distract him, bit him hard just below his right collarbone. It worked, as did clamping a hard grip onto the back of his right shoulder.

“Someday,” she moaned sweetly, somehow keeping them rocking a slow and blissful rhythm, “you'll have to tell me which one that was.”

“Cyrillic,” he whimpered back. “Upper and lower case. In cursive. Nothin' but the best for the like of a dame like you, Peg...Oh, God...Ahhh, you feel like _salvation_...nothin' but the **best**...”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually swiped the 'licking the alphabet' idea from a Sam Kinison comedy routine.


	10. 10

“ _Kyrie eleison_ ,” Carter moaned, her head dropping, after she'd inspected the contents of a plain manila envelope couriered over from Shield headquarters. Barnes went on high alert, this being a conglomeration of unusual behaviors and reactions from her. The Latin phrase he recognized as another extremely bad sign. He nearly stopped breathing when she looked up at him, tears already streaking her cheeks. “Sit down,” she said in that clipped tone she had when major news was afoot. “Shield just sent this over. Some freaky previously unknown gent is stirring up serious international trouble, bad enough that about eighteen international task forces are trying to track him to ground, Shield now included.”

She handed James, now sitting across their kitchen table from her, the first photo. It showed a tall, lean black-haired man of regal bearing who projected wicked intent written in his every long line. It took a moment of study to realize that either he was from someplace where fashion was very weird, or his tailor was incurably insane but genius-level talented. Everything about him, to her practiced eye, read as exotic, urbane, and highly dangerous. Judging by Barnes's expression, he probably agreed across that board. “Goes by the name Loki. He's only answered once when asked about his homeland and ancestry, and that was and I quote out of this file: ' **My** ancestors taught your vaunted Vikings and Norse to fear the deep cold dark,' end quote. Technically, he claims his full name is Loki Odinson.”

“ _Odinson_? He's not serious, right? Odin's son? Like straight out of Viking myths trickster god of chaos and deceit Loki Odinson? That's who he says he is?” Given his freedom to learn even when he'd still been behind the bars they'd first spoken through, he'd become a voracious reader across a wide swath of genres.

“And we apparently aren't actually sure he's kidding. He may even know what that thing Red Skull had powering all his weapons was. Some of our scientists say they have reason believe the two may have some kind of shared homeland, or connected origins, somewhere we've never been able to see. The equations went right over my head but Howard nodded a lot and looked very interested.” To anyone who knew him, those were bad signs in such a situation. If Howard had started taking notes, odds were this conversation would already have turned to assassination.

“What are we **sure** of?”

“That he's got finance more than in his favor, that he enjoys causing assorted mayhem that's all been political so far that we know of, that he's apparently fantastic at parties but an absolute nightmare in close-quarters combat, most particularly with knives. And that he seems to have apparently very recently...acquired...a bodyguard despite repeatedly proving more than capable of defending himself.” The look on her face sank his heart before she even passed over that photo. It showed a small group of well-dressed men, Loki included, gathered in some form of private garden. Most of the men had bodyguards looming about, and it was Loki's who caught Barnes's horrified eye—tall, blond, highly alert, hanging close to his employer, heavily muscled on a narrow-waisted, broad-shouldered frame, that jawline, that glare... “We...don't know what Loki's means of controlling him is just yet, but that's not even the best photo according to the file. It's...it's pretty clear he is who he looks like. Or was who he looks like.”

“I know that expression,” James said grimly, hoping his voice didn't give away his sudden feeling that all his safe moorings were cracking loose, about to sweep away everything he'd grown to love about his life. “Steve's not in charge of himself but he is in there, and you can bet he's not happy about it. Used to be when he was still scrawny and had pneumonia again and started looking like that around the eyes I'd have to tie his dumb ass to a bed and go find a doctor no matter what he said about it. And what he usually said about it I'd hesitate to repeat in decent company, because before Stark and Erskine, when he was the walking definition of 4F, Steve was a **salty** little shit with a wide-ranging vocabulary when he chose to use it. Whoever this Loki asshole is or isn't, Rogers isn't doing this job with free will. What does Shield plan to do about this mess?”

“They...they want us, James. They want us to bring him in and try to get his head clear. No preference on which one first.”

“You I understand,” he said softly, tilting her chin with a light hand when she tried to look away. “I'm a **very** bad idea. Even if we can get him back home inside his own brain, he thinks I'm _dead_. Springing me on him suddenly, his first assumption would be I'm either a hallucination or a Hydra plant, and the options only get worse from there. I **won** 't have your blood shed that way. Zero risk tolerance there.” That was a boundary he rarely drew so clearly.

“Then we don't let him see you unless I can get through on my own. I'm probably the only person besides you and maybe, just maybe, Phillips or Stark who might have a chance, and you know Loki's smart enough he'll never agree to meet with either of them so I could play secretary. Sending you in would be, according to something Howard built to do the math in hours rather than days, the option with the highest risk of failure and highest projected body count in the case of that failure. If we're incredibly lucky, Loki either doesn't know who I am or doesn't care. We're pretty sure Steve might recognize Howard or the Lieutenant General in a less than pleasant fashion, and that could get them all killed. And yes, I can understand the basics of risking him actually seeing you first. I'm the best chance Steve's got, and I really want you on my six for this, James. Please, since you're absolutely right about why we can't have you in his line of sight right off, protect me until we **know** if your friend is still in there.”

And every unspeakably dangerous rumor about those two men, rumors that far predated the war or the Howlies or all the public attention, blazed for true in his face. It was there only a few heartbeats before he had himself back to blankly casual. He got very pale when her expression named him for busted down to dirt. “Yeah, we were friends, but not what I'd call _just_ friends even if we never so much as said it. Neither of us could find a way to dare asking if it went both ways...I couldn't, at least...” His voice was actually shaking, which Carter found unnerving. It was the sound of his mooring points washing away.

“...James?” She sounded confused, as well she should when his nonchalance collapsed into half-barked, half-choked sobs. Even losing favorite chickens, which he found devastating, didn't drag those kind of sounds out of him. When he answered, he wouldn't look her in the eye.

“I know we could never have _kept_ what we had, Peg, but this isn't how or when I wanted us to have to stop. You know, you and me. You're a **hell** of a dame, darlin', the only one in my life I ever wanted so badly to keep. Don't worry. Won't take me long to re-adjust. And you know you won't have to watch any of it. Take your comfort where you can, Peg.”

“'Re-adjust'?” She blinked slowly a few times, confused.

“How blunt does it have to get, _Peggy_?” he growled, his tone deviating into as bitter as the way he still liked his black coffee. “You and Stark and your Goddamn fondue will get him all sorted out. Your white knight's as good as back, princess, and I'm sure the sunset you two ride off into will be as glorious as a woman like you could ever deserve.”

All things considered, he wasn't all that surprised when she punched him. Or that she didn't pull it in the least. A more ordinary man would probably have spit out a tooth or two.

“We live in a slightly more enlightened time, you surly ass. If he loves you the way I have always thought he did since I _watched_ him learn you'd not come back with the tattered remains of the 107th from Azzano, it's not the safest hobby to have anywhere near the public eye, but it's also no longer illegal...or diagnosable.”

“Stop pretending there's any other outcome. How I feel about either of you is irrelevant.”

“Not to me,” she insisted, but to empty air as he'd flowed back to his feet and, with that damn silent tread of his, could be anywhere in the house. Her bet was a beeline for the back door, and as expected she found him huddled in the chicken yard, passing out treats to the birds while he wept in silence. Their simple avian trust had turned out to be not simple at all, and now it was the only thing his despair hadn't just scoured clean.

James Barnes had been a young man with no firm plans but one deadly secret, then a willing soldier even when that secret flared back into his life, then an unwilling soldier in a war that had been planned to never end for him, and had grown into a complex and often confused man once freed to find his own fate. Now, she could see on his face when he wasn't aware she had line of sight on him, it was clear. He expected his lover and his best friend to step away from the limelight forever together once they were reunited, leaving him alone and stranded in a world where his life had little meaning or purpose, his history no coherence, his future no promise. All their missions, all their time, and he was still so sure of that betrayal; she wanted to tear her hair out in frustration. True, Steve Rogers had always owned a very specific part of her heart, but she wasn't willing to bet on how he'd view her now after all the time that had passed for her while he slept on in the ice, or what she could have done with James to convince him of her sincerity short of the several times she'd strongly debated proposing marriage to Barnes over a quiet meal at home.

“Of course I'll have your six,” he said flatly, letting her wonder how he'd figured out she was there. The truth was that in her discord she had forgotten his augmented hearing, but even what he'd heard in her breathing could not change his mind this time. “Until he's himself enough to want the job. Then you'll never need to see me again. I'll know the first time he actually recognizes you.” She left him be; she knew that tone of voice and it always meant nothing short of proof right in front of his face was ever going to persuade him that there could be the room he wanted in her life once they had Rogers back. If he could even be retrieved. Deep down in places even James rarely saw, she began to fervently pray that she would not have to give her already-lost lover the kill-shot signal on the other great love of both their lives.

Even in the inescapable strategy meetings, they did not speak directly to one another again as the mission parameters fell neatly into place. Although Stark and Phillips both had sharp eyes and wondered what the hell was up, neither asked awkward questions when it became clear both Carter and Barnes were listening intently at every briefing.


	11. 11

Peggy got in close enough easily, lightly disguised and falsely but convincingly identified as a newspaper reporter with a few questions for the haughty stranger who had somehow managed to wind up with diplomatic credentials.

“Oh, aren't you just a lovely one,” Loki greeted her, smiling back when she tilted him a grin that said she rather liked his odd, somewhat lilting accent. “I suppose I can shake a few minutes out of this morning, if you'll be so kind as to keep your questions brief.”

“Thank you, sir, for the offer and the compliment.” It was so incredibly hard not to look, to feign ignorance of his nearby black-clad blond bodyguard's intent scrutiny after she'd spoken, her own soft accent deliberately allowed in her words. She asked a few shallow questions relevant to his recent known activities, parting ways after a firm handshake that left Loki watching as she walked away.

By the time it occurred to him to check his bodyguard's response, Rogers was in his usual blank, motionless distance, attention on the nearest people and perimeter points. Well...perhaps the woman had not been who he'd thought at first, who she certainly looked like based on images in many a classified dossier Loki had gained access to over time.

The troublemaker was long since asleep for the night under other protection when Peggy's highly trained instincts warned her she was no longer alone in her modest motel room. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, a pistol in easy reach, all the lights out, just waiting as she had since shortly after the 'interview'.

“No need to hide yourself, young man.”

“What, you think I'm no danger?” The scorn in his familiar voice hurt.

“Quite the opposite. I know a great deal about how dangerous you are, which only starts at 'extremely'. But I also know you're here, so stealth is no longer crucial.”

“So you do know me. And you know the game. Suddenly I wonder if you actually wanted Loki's attention at all.”

“I thought you might have taken notice. No, Loki was not my priority. Yes, I...knew you, once upon a long time ago for me, during the war, before the ice.” That drew his eyebrows together. “And what I must guess was some form of memory erasure based on how you're acting. Do you know my name?”

“No. Do you know mine?”

“Yes. Has it been kept from you?”

“Diligently. Loki's not the worst boss in the world, but he's very careful how I'm spoken to and around, as well as what access to outside information I can use.”

“Do you care to change that? I can tell you...things you might never imagine wanting to know.” He still didn't stir from the shadowy corner he was leaning into.

“You don't sound happy about that prospect.”

“There are a lot of things I can tell you that won't make me happy. You still deserve to know if you want to; that choice isn't mine to make.”

“At what cost do your answers come?”

“Your job with Loki, whose threat potential many agencies are still trying to assess. Public exposure, notoriety, fame for things far out of your normal character, things the man I remember wearing your face would find difficult to live with. Possible legal charges, jail time, courts, lawyers.”

“And at what cost to you? I can see something in you that's not altogether worried about my fate, whatever that may be. So it must be about your own.”

“The inevitable cost to my life is love, a bill already come due and paid with much regret from me. I've lost it all. Companionship. Deep friendship. The future we planned. If I complete the mission I've been given, if I bring you in alive and hopefully willing to talk, I lose everything but my job and a home made by a couple that will be solely mine the next time I see it. And every time after.”

He was pacing just that fast, tense, impressively light on his feet for a man his size, and entirely unaware that the billboard across the street was providing sniper cover. “You're not making a lot of sense.” But her familiarity felt stronger and stronger...that voice, her accent...a flash across his mind's eye of remembered terror as the water raced closer, as the engines screamed protest...

“At this point you have two choices. I can tell you what I know that you do not, or I can give the right signal and you'll be dead before you hit the floor. Either way I go home alone, because he is so certain he couldn't possibly be worth it, not compared to you. In his certainty, he's forced my hand.”

“Since I'm in even less of a mood to be dead than I am to be unemployed, you'd better start talking sense, ma'am. Tell me what I don't know, starting with just who you are.”

“My name is Peggy Carter.” She watched that sink in, saw it leave slow ripples in its wake. “I didn't come here alone, unprotected. We know better than you do that you can kill me with your bare hands before I could fire my pistol, which is why I'm not here alone. My companion's name is not yet relevant. Yours is Steven Rogers.” That one froze him up. “I probably look older than you remember me, if you do.” Slowly, with an audible gulp, he nodded. “We last spoke near the end of what is now called World War Two.” The big news headline that had attracted Rogers's attention the most one morning at breakfast with his boss shortly after he'd been thawed out had been about some military scuffle off Cuba that was being called the Bay of Pigs. Of course she looked older; it had been nearly twenty years for her and only a few weeks for him.

Outside, behind the billboard, the sniper read their body language with most of his attention on the other man and a single tear tracked down one of his cheeks over what he could see cracking loose in the big blond. His aim with the rifle, however, did not waver.

“What's the last thing you remember before Loki? Right now we're just assuming he's got to be the one who found you, because no one else has come forward. Just about everyone else we could think of would have. But I knew you...a long time ago, in my lifetime.”

“The war,” he said hollowly, his head sinking. “After...after that fucking train,” he whispered harshly. “Red Skull? Is that a name? A person?” Peggy nodded. “I...I didn't kill him, but I watched him die. I watched him melt alive without any heat or chemicals. It was horrible. He shrieked like a siren...and I liked it because...he killed...those weird-looking weapons...that awful blue light...he killed...

“But his plane...it was some strange design...some weird power source that melted its way free after it killed him...burned right through the metal...it was a cold blue cube...bombs...ice...so much blue and **cold**...a dance...a reunion...” He had collapsed to his knees, shaking. His hands were clamped to the sides of his head, eyes screwed shut, lower lip already bleeding where he'd bitten it more than once.

“The dance was to have been mine,” Carter admitted sadly. “The reunion, something tells me not.” That was when the blond turned to her, tear-glazed eyes wide.

“He...I remember snow, ice, blood, a ravine..that blue light, that horrible blue light...on the train...I almost...had him...almost got his hand...”

“Almost.” He dropped further, this time winding up in a tight fetal curl on the carpet. “There is so much more, Steve. So much you don't know. But you have to come out of it and hear me.” With obvious force of will, he did.

Behind the billboard, fingerprints were wiped away, footprints swept into dusty streaks, the rifle expertly broken down and swiftly packed.

“You scuttled Red Skull's plane near Greenland because there wasn't time to deactivate the bombs, the city-killers in its belly, one with your hometown's name literally painted on it. That has been taken care of now.” They just didn't know how any more than they knew how this Loki character had found him, because when their kitted-up elite bomb squad started opening cases, the guts of each had been severely damaged to leave no trace of their original power sources or actual explosives. Even Howard was still working on making any sort of sense out of what remained.

“But...I talked, the whole time on the plane after he was gone, I was on the radio...with the sweetest voice...a promise I wanted to cut my throat knowing I'd already broken...with you?”

“Yes. With me.”

“I can't imagine why I wouldn't have tried to come back to a dame like you. Sorry. A lady like you. I was out a while, and I keep getting called old-fashioned now.” Since the sniper was gone, she was the only one to see him make a brief attempt at a smile.

“Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.” That snapped him back to attention until he lunged for a throw pillow yanked off a recliner, into which he could muffle a shriek of refreshed loss. “You thought he would be your reunion, but it turned out...you were wrong. If the ice _had_ killed you, he wouldn't have been waiting on the other side of your death.” Glassy blue eyes found her level gaze again while she gathered the courage to tell him the whole truth. “Whatever happened to Sergeant Barnes in Azzano, however he was changed before you went in alone and barely armed to find him and ripped the whole place apart in the process, allowed him to survive the fall.

“Hydra took him back after the train, Steve. Changed him. Twisted him. Tortured and brainwashed him into history's most legendary assassin. They made James Barnes into the Winter Soldier, a walking weapon wanted dead upon arrival in at least eight countries to this day. He showed back up a few years after you went in the ice, and we were eventually able to capture him and deactivate the changes, shut down the obedient assassin without destroying the good man. James Barnes is a very different man in some ways than you remember, Captain Rogers,” and oh boy did he remember that rank and title by now, “but he is also very much alive.”

“And why is that the point at which you've suddenly screeched to a halt?” Steve asked warily when she did not continue.

“Because in our strange shared time that was only supposed to be supervision between missions chosen at our own discretion, I've grown to love the man James Barnes has become a great deal. But he remembers it all now, the war, the two of you, the three of us, what you and I were on the cusp of becoming, and we came looking to find out if you wanted yourself back very clear on one detail. Whether I signal him to shoot you or not, I'll never see him again. He's convinced himself that with you alive, he couldn't possibly be worth my time. No word out of my mouth will ever persuade him otherwise.”

“Even when I had nothing...” Rogers choked slowly, and Peggy nodded, knowing the rest of that quote perfectly well from stories Barnes had told of their pre-war lives.

“If you can find a way free of Loki—and fast—and you never come near me again, he may eventually get curious enough to come looking for answers. He won't come to me again, but he might come to you if I stay away.”

There weren't any more questions she would answer, which she made clear by packing her few things and leaving the room, leaving the hotel, leaving the city. Leaving him scrambling in his own head for answers even as he made his stealthy way back to hope he was a good enough actor that Loki wouldn't notice anything off about him until it was too late to keep his controls in place. Whoever Odinson really was, he'd have to find a new bodyguard or some new hobbies very soon.

She retreated back to the little haven in New England, had the telephone disconnected, and thereafter was so rarely seen on supply runs in town that neighbors occasionally did stop by to be sure she was all right. Those who noticed and asked about her companion's absence were told only that he had decided country life was not his destiny. They all clucked and tutted, saying what a sweet young man he'd been, how nicely he'd spoken, and she always kept up a brave face until she could sob into Jemima's feathers. The original hen given that name was gone, but Carter would be certain to always keep a silver-laced Wyandotte hen in the flock to continue the name, to hold on to those cherished memories of peace and slow-grown love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the gap in posting. Turns out my pain meds have also failed, so my sleep schedule is pretty off kilter. Should be able to finish in one last run at this.


	12. 12

With his preferred bodyguard suddenly missing and clearly determined to stay off the grid, Loki scuttled a couple of political dealings he had under way and vanished, a rare error on the side of caution in his case. Few people saw Steve Rogers, who had painted his iconic shield solid black after stealing it from a military museum that one of Loki's henchmen had earned a nasty punishment for sneaking off and selling it to without permission, as he roved the nighttime highways on his motorcycle, often with the lights off because with his augmented night vision even a crescent moon was plenty of light. He had grown a strong affection for the desert states of the southwestern US, spending hundreds of solitary hours on empty highways, sometimes but rarely bothering to dig a few art supplies out of a saddlebag to sketch a scene that was most often a sunrise. Every mile seemed to render him a little more bearded, scruffy, and dusty than the one before, and he was feeling that 'take a break' ache low in his lumbars that meant it was time to find a room for a couple of nights. He was out in some barren high country, which limited his choices pretty sharply to “the first one with a lit Open sign”.

After a night of unsatisfying sleep, he dug out his least filthy ensemble, decided it was too damn hot to keep the road-ravaged tatters of even a short beard, threw the rest of his clothes in the motel's washer, and ambled across the street to a cafe with breakfast in mind after a quick shave. Having an accelerated metabolism was a bitch when he was on wheels; he often found himself bartering for extra food by offering to handyman around a place for a few days. This morning was already feeling like one of those days, so he ordered a large breakfast.

As he was paying, he happened to glance past the shoulder of the pretty girl at the register and notice one of the cooks was looking his way, most of his face covered by a beard net over three-day stubble and a bandana tied over his hair, but those wide eyes too familiar to ever forget. Steve managed to choke out a single word through the stun that left him feeling like he'd been punched in the gut.

“ _Bucky_?”

“Yo, Jimbo, get yer shell-shocked ass back to work,” the kitchen boss growled, and when the man they'd both spoken to turned back to the register, Rogers was gone.

Barnes left late and quiet that night after pulling a double, glad to see no sign of the motorcycle or its rider.

Which, it turned out, was premature of James because both were parked alongside a small cook fire at his 'home', a little grotto in a canyon wall that didn't cost any rent and suited Barnes just fine. It held warmth well, concealed firelight, and was even out of the way of most of the flash flooding. And he had been unerringly tracked right to it by the virtual stranger he'd been willing to die for in the war, the one he had been sure the fall off the train would leave room for the world to elevate the icon brewed from his first and most forbidden love.

“So, Bucky, how about you tell me right now what the _fuck_ was worth breaking Peggy's heart like you did?” Only then did Barnes see the gun resting on the other man's thigh, safety off, an old pistol like the mule-sturdy sidearms they'd both carried during the war. And Rogers did not sound friendly, although he spoke softly. His eyes were as cold as the ice Loki had dug him out of with magic, and the firelight gave them a flickering aspect uncomfortably like that awful weaponized blue fire both men still had nightmares about.

“Maybe we just needed one **more** thing in common. You know...augmented, presumed dead, wartime heroes out of their era, kids who ran hellion all over Brooklyn, freed from servitude, defrosted. That about covers it.”

“No. You left off the part about men who love Peggy Carter and broke her heart anyway.”

“Obviously, by now I understand why she looked past me like I never existed that first time we met after Azzano. Never forgot how she looked at you, though.”

“So why did she tell me that finding me, saving me, would cost her you? Why could I see all over her how much that hurt her to say? Why was she _right_?”

“Steve,” he said quietly as he finally sat down, “believe me, I know how you look at someone you love. I watched you grow up, and I learned a lot from you when it wasn't me you looked at ever since we were kids. I watched you look at her that way again through a rifle scope, which hurt no less than watching in person at a range of about two feet back in that bar, the night the Howlies formed up. And **you** were the one who taught me to lip-read, so I know how the conversation was going, that she told you her so-called penalty in not seeing me again. She hasn't. She was the best handler I ever had, completely amazing as a partner, and my best friend while we thought you lost to us, but I made the terms of that mission very clear to her. On her six, then out of her life.” A lot of time alone with classic fiction had changed a great deal about how he spoke—but his still unamused companion had always hated the way the brunet had done what Steve always called 'shucky-damning yourself to idiot Hell' by downplaying his intelligence so often, and he spared just a single heartbeat to appreciate the change before the next hard question.

“So why not go ahead and just shoot me when it was the easy choice and reclaim your home, your love, your life?”

“None of us deserved for me to do that because you did nothing to earn it and neither did Peg. A man who **could** have done that, who would have taken that choice from both of you so irretrievably, would have shot himself rather than risk her finding him after that. Those Hydra bastards turned me into someone horrible, but the walking weapon they created has been permanently deactivated, and in my world now a man worth the air he breathes _does not_ use his free will to slaughter the innocent. But the basic truth remains—she has no idea where I am, hasn't had since that night, and won't ever see me again if I see her first. She deserves better, so your path is clear.”

“You may be mistaken about her.”

“And you could be mistaken about a lot of things!” Barnes snapped hotter and rougher than he'd intended. Startled, Rogers lifted a single eyebrow, and his childhood friend spilled over where he'd planned to keep silent. The oldest, blackest cauldron in his heart had been boiling quite long enough. “You've always looked right past important shit, so bad there were days I was the one wanted most to beat you into a hospital visit. If you'd paid attention you **never** would have scuttled that flying fortress of Red Skull's. You've been loved almost every minute of your fucked-up life, you idiotic punk asshole, and you never even _**saw** _ it!” The counter-question left him momentarily breathless.

“Did you _really_ think it was **all** hero worship for pulling so many bullies off me, you fucking jerk?” That slow growl seemed to grind time to a halt alongside the small campfire. “You're smarter than that, smarter than just about anyone ever gave you full credit for. Of course I never told you—it was illegal, it was immoral, and there was also the _minor_ detail that you were pretty much drippin' in dames any time you felt like. And you kept trying to drag me along, when the girls kept turning up their noses and I'd go home and jerk off imagining being in their place, being with you, how you'd sound and smell and feel. God, Buck, you are fucking _thick_ about some things.” The nickname shook loose long-hidden and painful memories.

“Like what those musclebound fuckheads I worked with down at the docks to keep your inhaler full would do to you if I let one hint slip that I'd rather have been fucking you than their sisters?”

“Now **that** is dirty pool, shithead.” Even the harsh answer didn't do much about the fact that the blond was going to have to fidget his jeans into a more comfortable fit very soon.

“No it isn't. It's the Goddamn horrible selfish truth about the man you followed into a war that tried to rip modern society apart and nearly succeeded. Those times I'd absolutely refuse to let you stay home knowing perfectly well how much you hated the way dames treated you right in front of me? No matter how well I was hiding how much I hated them for doing it over and over again? Those were the nights I'd heard you were up for a beating just for _looking_ like you did, no matter how hard you tried with all those bitches who put their noses in the air. Peggy's the only woman I've ever met who saw you like I did, saw your heart and soul instead of asthma and scoliosis, who cared about the size of the man instead of the size of the body, who fucking well deserves you.”

“And what do _you_ deserve, Bucky? What do I deserve in your world? It took me three seconds, just three seconds too fucking long to realize I could have let go of the train, tried to save you, survived the fall the way I thought you hadn't. I could have selfishly wanted to be sure and ended up saving you or landing us both with Hydra or getting us both dead while losing the entire fucking war for the Allies. Do you have any idea what feeling like I **do** deserve _that_ memory does to my head every Goddamn lonely day of what will probably be a very long life, Buck? I haven't been out of ice near as long as you have and that is what I wake up with every day now. I have since she set me free, with you watching through a scope if I recall the conversation right.”

“I got ripped out of my brainwashed peace into a world that thought you dead and knew me for a man-made abomination unequaled in human history. By a woman who risked her life to dance with me while I was still caged like an animal and no one else would even speak to me or make eye contact, a woman I told was the most treacherous bitch I'd ever met the first time I remember speaking to her after the damn war. The same one who set me free forever just because she could, who killed the Winter Soldier so that I could try to have a life again, one she even asked to be part of with me before it was safe. The one I was not smart enough, not strong enough to keep from falling for, and hard, once she had banished Hydra's favorite pet monster. Once she taught me how to trust and why men value hope. But now _you're_ back among the living, just not at her side where we both know you belong. That is the one part I don't understand.”

“So we both want her, we both love her, and you're sure **I'm** the so-called winner while **you** have earned nothing with all your courage and caution and time and work while I was still frozen solid and presumed irretrievable?”

“What else matters?”

Rogers paused for a long sigh, gritting his teeth, before speaking again to loose his deepest secret to change the space between them forever, be it good or ill in the end. “Bucky, good _Christ_ help us both, if I thought you'd do anything but snap my neck for it I'd offer to take you instead of her. For real. For good. Right now. For as long as we get. To a bed, to my heart, anywhere you'd have me, **Jesus** , man, I've had it _bad_ for you since 1932, you asshole. I had lots of free time to read up on a few things while I was...working...with Loki. Lot more time since then roaming the roads to think about what I read up on.”

His teeth were bared, but not in quite the same expression Carter had seen during their first conversation, and his vocal snarl was nothing like the growl he'd always used when their word games turned rough. This was uncharted, and unsafe, territory. “I got bear traps in places you never dreamed existed in me, big fuckers every one. Watch your damn mouth or you're gonna end up bent over your bike seat getting railed like I paid you for it, _Stevie_.”

Rogers responded fast, setting the safety and putting the pistol aside before yanking Barnes back to his feet and slamming them chest-to-chest, his own back to the cliff. A wavering little “... _ **please**_?” prayed barely more than a whisper into his slightly open mouth was absolutely not what James had expected to hear. “I mean it, Buck. Thirty-two. That spring was the first time I woke up from dreaming about you and I was _still coming_ in my pajamas without even using my hands on myself, you impossible jackass. I **dare** you to tell me I'm the only one who wants one of us bent over my Harley screaming the other's name and make me believe it.”

“Not even gonna calculate those odds,” Barnes growled softly, having discovered he truly was done hiding his feelings about his childhood friend. “So what do we do about this mess, punk?” Now the rebellious light he remembered so well flared in those so-blue eyes.

“Fuck like jackrabbits fresh out of prison at every opportunity along the road to wherever you think she's gone to ground. Find her and tell her how we feel about everything. If both of us are man enough. Take everything else from there.”

“Even if it's not the same one, it'll be a little farm in New England. No one gets her chickens away from her but me, and that's only because the metal arm attracts the feathery idiots. Turns out I kind of like them back, how weird is that? She'd probably stay at the old place until my scent fence wears off...”

“Your **what** the fuck wears off?”

“Right, I got distracted. I'll tell you later. Right after _one_ of us gets bent over the seat of your bike,” and with that he took the leap, his lips on Steve's for the first time feeling like he'd never kissed anyone else but Peg, immediately giddy over the feel of their mingled breath. Dizzy from the taste of Steve's mouth and the deep moan that rolled out of his lean belly somehow sounding like it had started at the soles of Rogers's feet. And neither of them would ever forget that first precipitous moment, a secret nearly half a century old loosed at last and no one dead for it. That first night, after some aggressive but entertaining foreplay to figure out a few preferences, it was Bucky who wound up with his belly pressed to the seat, the tears of pain quickly replaced by mutters, then moans, then outright howls for more, harder, deeper, oh **God** that one spot...! He lost track of how many times he got off, but didn't bitch about how much of the bike's engine and frame he had to clean up afterward.

Before passing out in a warmth-saving curl with Steve's narrower frame in front, they scraped together just enough brain cells to agree it would be fun taking turns with the motorcycle for a brace, since it was a massive Softail even their vigor had hardly shifted.

After breakfast, it was Bucky's idea to bend Steve over it from the other side to make sure both directions were stable enough to handle both men while the motorcycle had its front tire turned and the kickstand down. The bike had no problems and Barnes took his sweet time with Rogers, speaking clearly only when he could tell the other man was already coming yet again just to hear Steve whine about that soft threat of “just what I'm gonna **do** to you, Stevie, as _soon_ as we find a place with a shower...”

They quickly discovered it was a hell of a lot safer to fuck on the floor in even the scary cheap motels, because broken beds just caused too much hassle. Although Bucky was visibly obviously older than Steve these days despite his relatively slow physical aging, once they could enjoy things they both preferred to do only when they'd freshly bathed it was quickly clear they had enough vigor to level a brothel between them. They could have made it to the farm in five long days, but chose to idle along for a week despite feeling the time hanging over their heads.

Both men knew this was likely the longest stretch of private time they'd have free of grief for a very long while to come, and both enjoyed having the chance to get to know one another not only as lovers in a slightly more accepting society but as good friends once more. With people around, they tended to keep their vibe slow, mellow, and without romantic or sexual overtones. In private, they learned what they liked best, wanted most, and preferred to avoid when it came to both conversation and sex, and Barnes did a remarkable job of keeping locked in his fears about what might happen when the two people in all the world he truly loved were in the same airspace for the first time since that night he'd hidden behind the billboard to see if his shooting skills would be needed. Rogers did a remarkable job of keeping them both distracted because he'd always been horny as a ram, even in his sickly youth, and the serum hadn't missed that quality in him. All his morals and noble aspirations and old-fashioned good manners tended to get completely overwhelmed at the first hint of lust. Bucky had the stamina, but Steve was easier to get off and rarely good for less than three spectacular orgasms on any given occasion.


	13. 13

By the time they finally coasted silently in under the car cover at the small farm, they knew they made an attractive—and obvious—couple any time they wanted to, or they could come off as near strangers. Steve tagged nervously along as Bucky walked a familiar fence line, restlessly scanning the woodlands and fields around the little farm.

Suddenly, there was a flapping racket, a familiar feminine voice uttering some extremely unladylike words, and Rogers found himself laughing so hard he had to sit down. Barnes, who was trying very carefully not to drop Jemima as she attempted to climb his metal arm so she could roost in his hair, waited until the hen was clear before grabbing Steve under the armpits and hoisting him bodily into the chicken yard through a temporary-access flap cleverly built into the hawk netting and currently sitting open. Then he reached into a nearby lidded bucket and tossed a handful of cracked corn, the flock's favorite, all over the blond.

Peggy, covered in sawdust and feathers from the sudden exodus, made it out of the coop in time to see Barnes coddling and supporting Jemima with his right hand as he stepped over the fence toward Rogers, who by this time was a pile of kneecaps, feathers, flapping, giggling and “that is my _hair_ , not wheat, you infernal bird!” at the center of a feeding frenzy.

Jemima finally lost her throne, sliding down Bucky's left side to end up comfortable in the crook of the prosthetic's elbow. She overbalanced when James leaned in to help Steve back to his feet, and for a moment the watching woman stood breathless when the leaning in didn't stop until their mouths met. Jemima took advantage of the momentary pause to climb right back to her favorite 'flop spot' in the world as she knew it, a trick Carter had trained her into in case she ever got to see Barnes again.

“You look ridiculous with feathers in your hair, Stevie.”

“You look even worse with a whole Goddamn live chicken on your head, Buck. And I think we have attracted some new attention,” he grinned, tilting his head toward the coop. “Let's go see which of us she kills first.”

“Good plan. Sorry, there, Jemima, but you gotta use your own feet for a while, you fat ol' biddy.” He plucked the relaxed hen off his head, settling some of her irritated cackle-grumbles with practiced hackle and saddle scritches under her black-lined white feathers. Steve definitely noticed in his peripheral vision that the sight of Bucky playing with the birds surging around his feet seemed familiar to both Barnes and Peggy, who had at least made it to standing outside the coop.

Most of the chickens followed the blond back up to the building, largely because he was still shedding chunks of cracked corn. “Morning, Peggy,” Rogers said softly once he was in range. “This is a beautiful place, the kind of place I always pictured you and some lucky fella raising a brood of adorable babies.”

“There were questions you maybe should have asked,” Carter fired back, tense and a little disoriented. Steve was, unlike in those first photos they'd seen, very much at home in his own mind again. “I'm sterilized. Having a child in my line of work would have been a disaster. How did you convince him to bring you here?”

“After finally telling him what I needed to about he and I, all I had to do was ask.”

“And what was that conversation like?”

Now Barnes, this time cradling an immense wad of honey-golden Orpington hen, broke in quietly. “He and I are two men with a hell of a lot in common,” Bucky started. “Both veterans of one of the biggest wars in history, both used rough in the name of victory for freedom. Enhanced in ways science still hasn't duplicated that the world knows about. Literally frozen, repeatedly in my case and for a very long time in his, and somehow thawed out alive but with our memories wiped by deliberate actions of others. Wartime heroes in a peacetime world we don't fit into all that well. Anachronisms, men out of their own time, who cannot go back home. Men who've been released from subjugation by the same courageous soul with no strings attached. Childhood friends from Brooklyn. Lovers like we did both wish we could have been before the war if it hadn't been so horrendously illegal.”

“And two men who, because apparently our lives weren't hard enough, both love you, Peggy. Each other as well, the way you can see but don't dare say.” Steve spoke low and quiet, pausing to scruffle itchy feathers for a couple of the braver birds and clearly, charmingly surprised they readily enjoyed the attention even from a stranger. Bucky could see clearly that his friend and new lover was trying very, very hard not to get immediately attached to the birds in case he didn't get to stay.

“If you have each other...is this goodbye?” The wobbly hint of incoming tears in her question got her both men's attention.

“I'd really prefer it not be that answer,” Barnes answered softly. “For any of us. I mean, yeah, we have what we have, he and I, and it's something that would've gotten us a secret date with a firing squad after the war. All behind the scenes, of course, with some suitably heroic story behind the false KIA reports. Something that would have been worth dying for back then, might still be but I hope I'm lucky enough to never have to find out for certain. I find I've gotten downright fond of being alive, sentient, and in full possession of my free will. I learned a lot while we were apart at my insistence, Peg, and all of it made me miss us more except for the parts I turned out to be keeping for him.”

“I'm not into saying unnecessary goodbyes any more,” Steve added when her gaze shifted his way. “I've lost enough no matter how much of it finds its way back into my life in any shape or form. I love him the way I thought I'd never be allowed to show, but I've loved you a long time too. I want you both, if I could possibly get that lucky.”

“And I want you both too, on wildly differing individual merits leading to highly convergent hobbies,” James added, grinning sweetly. “All we need is your opinion about maybe taking a chance on the both of us.”

“The wide world out there,” Rogers gestured slowly so as to avoid startling the less courageous birds just beginning to check him out, “does not need to know about life on your farm. In the time I spent roving alone, I met all kinds of families. All the real family I've ever had since the war is right here, both of you. We've all felt the pain by now of forcing ourselves to make the wrong choices. Let's skip that part this time, please, Peggy?”

“ _Kyrie eleison_ ,” she sighed.


	14. 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So here's the twist ending I didn't put anything else about in the tags. Not the most original...but based in part on my 23 years of experience with polyamory as a lifestyle.

“All right, you men,” Carter began with a dramatic flourish in her tone once they were totally distracted by an immense dinner, “you'd better have some ideas for exactly how you want turning us three into an emotionally and physically intimate unit to work.”

“I do have one question,” Bucky said warily after another bite of that amazing roast from a locally-grown cow. “You and I, Peg, we have our own history, and it's pretty extensive in both emotion and physicality.” He looked over at Steve, who was visibly nervous and confused. “You see already, Steve, I can tell. I've _never_ been able to call her Peggy because that was for you. She may still be one of the best keepers of secrets I've ever met—don't look at me like that, Peg, I would never ask you to stop keeping secrets even from me—but the Peggy Carter the world got to know during the war was **your** best girl. After the war she worked harder than anyone else I've ever known but you, in this case to try to keep our country steered toward things that you'd be proud to be part of if she could just have found you first.

“The one thing you two never got a chance to have was any kind of non-military contact in private, so far as the Howlies ever knew. We all knew you were absolutely fuckin' well stupid in love with her, which is the smaller part of why nobody but nobody talked shit about our Carter.”

“I remember the bigger part being centered around several sets of broken feet, busted balls, and a couple of long cool stares down a gun barrel,” Rogers grinned awkwardly before returning his attention to dinner. He'd been lucky as fuck that shield was what it was described as, considering she'd pulled a trigger at close range four times in the wake of catching him getting worked over by one of the prettier secretaries who'd backed him into a corner. Never had that long cool stare wavered, just as after that her faith in him had been rock solid.

“Is there going to be a question in there somewhere, James, or did you get lost digressing into nostalgia on us?”

“Sassy dame, you are,” he snorted with the kind of easy familiarity he shared with very few people. “The question is do you and Steve want some private time to get to know one another? I could do anything from weed the garden for a few hours to sign on for a couple of days on some Shield shit cleanup squad, depending on how much time.”

“I...actually,” Steve managed roughly, “I think we might all need some time to adjust to a steep learning curve, and I don't think anybody getting cut or shoved out of the picture we're trying to paint, no matter for what reason or how long, is going to help. We're negotiating trying to experiment with one of the most controversial alternative lifestyles as they're calling it now, and it may take our combined undivided attention to keep from stumbling over any of half a dozen common relationship killers on this path. I'm a little scared of the kind of world I woke up into, and I'm absolutely sure I'm really tired of being alone. I want you both, I need you both, I love you both, and the only thing that terrifies me more than the idea of losing one of you again is losing both of you. I...I should be the last man in the country to want his hand held and some training wheels, but at least for a while I think I need a lot of time with you both before I really feel safe again.”

Neither of them could resist the resonant need in his tone, the serious tilt of his eyebrows, the worry shining in his expression. Nor, after dinner and an engrossing oceanography documentary, were they inclined to resist his suggestion that two of the five rooms be designated 'fuckery zones' while the other three would be solitary private space. Rogers found the biggest guest bed and was relieved to see several chairs around the room; he was perched tensely on one when Peggy and Bucky joined him. Steve actually jumped when Barnes stripped off his shirt and undershirt and then flung them to land with pinpoint accuracy for maximum mussing of blond hair.

Carter was the one who picked them up, cheerfully scolding him about the proper uses of laundry hampers...while deftly seeing to it that Steve's upper body wear joined Bucky's. Rogers clearly couldn't decide whether he should melt into finally getting to feel her hands on his bare skin for more than brief accidental touches or feel absolutely horrible about himself for daring to lust over a woman his own ethics insisted was off limits. But his childhood best friend could still read him like a book, and it was a matter of minutes before Steve was sitting on the bed with that same woman astride his lap to kiss and purr and tease while Barnes sat on the other side of the bed and used both flesh and metal hands to assault the tension in Rogers's back. And occasionally nip at the side of Steve's neck, or catch a good angle for stealing a quick kiss from Carter.

In less than fifteen sweaty blissful minutes, they had him flat on his back, writhing helplessly under fingers and tongues and teeth, softly begging for one or both of them to have a go at pretty much turning him inside out. Peggy tilted her head at Bucky, who busted out the smirk that had caused more than one pre-war dancing date to literally swoon. “Peg, darlin', he's got a hell of a mouth but I think now might be a good time to convince him to stop talking unless we can get him screamin',” Barnes suggested before undoing the blond's pants to go directly for finding out if he could actually do this, be man enough not to fuck it all up. Grinning, Carter straddled Rogers's face while the other man was delighted to find his gag reflex still MIA. The noise Steve made after his first slow, careful licks fell apart almost instantly, done in by a combination of the luxuriously delighted noises Carter could not have stopped if she'd wanted and _holy hell_ , no, Bucky still **hadn't** got his gag reflex back, and those pregnancy-fearing chorus girls had taught Rogers some _very_ interesting tricks on the safe occasions that cropped up before he'd declared himself off the press tour.

And somehow, even when it was Peggy making either man scream—more than once—they never went so far as to forget the need for caution even when both men were awash in brain-bending passion. By the end of the night, they could feel the stirrings of uncertainty in their hearts and minds already stilling. By the end of the week, the men had to sheepishly slink into town to buy tools and supplies because they'd broken the big bed's frame in two places, one with her and one on their own. By the end of the month, they knew they were a solid unit, free of any of the major relationship killers that had worried them. By the end of the season, they were a strange little farm family, each solidly unwilling to tolerate any trespass on their bonds with one another should anyone ever press the issue.


	15. 15:  Epilog

For Christmas that year, they had the phone hooked back up under her name, and it was Carter who called to re-establish contact with first Howard and then Phillips. Both were surprised to be invited to the farm for holiday dinner, a few days before the actual holidays so they could both keep their family plans. The privileged few who got to see Peggy's sneaky Polaroids of the looks on the guests' faces when Steve and Bucky worked in tandem to get an immense roasted turkey from the kitchen to the table found the pictures hilarious. Neither Stark nor Phillips—now retired from his Army service and Lead Agent Chester Phillips, the director and staunch backbone of Shield—had been warned that either man would be part of the night. A girl had to have her secrets, after all, and her fun. James's one attempt to pick on Phillips, who he still insisted on calling Colonel, screeched to a halt when he was shown the picture of himself asleep with Jemima on his head and smaller chickens occupying nearly every comfortable spot on and around him, which had been brought along for just such blackmail albeit with Carter the predicted target. That targeting cost Howard a twenty because he didn't pay much attention to how people actually interacted and he failed to even consider the possibility of Peggy not living alone when she'd made no mention of either man flanking her at the table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there you have it. This is now a completed work. As always, if anyone likes the setup and wants to carry this storyline further, I'd love to know about it and read any pertinent results.


End file.
